“So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost”

“But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.”

“She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.”

“Nothing really good will ever happen to me if I stay in Gutshot; and maybe that's true. But nothing really bad will ever happen, either, and I'll take that bargain any day.”

“I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.”

“I imagine runningto the creek and diving in headfirst, the creek so shallow that my hands scrape against the rocks, and my bodyslides into the cold water, the shock of the cold giving way to numbness, and I would stay there, float down withthat water first to the Cahaba River, then to the Alabama River, then to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.”

“So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.”